I've figured it out! I know now why British people say "maths".
They had an extra s when they took it off of "sports". They had to put it somewhere, so they just put it on the end of "math".
What is the priority for your MC right now? — #PennedPossibilities 46
We'll start at the very beginning of the story. The MC is 142 and on his deathbed. He has, maybe, a few hours to live. Memories of his former lives are suddenly starting to come to him.
He thinks back on the many lives he's lived, but ponders more deeply about the life he's just about to leave. He thinks of his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even a few great-great-grandchildren.
He's left many lives unfinished, and doesn't want this to be one of them.
His priority now is to ensure his children are left with the knowledge of how much he loves them, and how enriched his life has been because of them.
He wonders if his next life will be as fulfilling as this one.
I started a new story several weeks ago. As an aside, I'm really going to finish a story someday, and not just get 75% done and run out of steam.
Anyway, the current #WIP deals with reincarnation. I haven't taken part in any of the writing games, like #WritingWonders because I couldn't figure out how to answer any of the questions. My MC is literally dozens of people spread across millennia.
How do I answer a question like "Is MC good at flirting?" Are we talking about the cavewoman, or the six year old girl in Detroit, or the rice farmer in medieval Japan who became a young widower? All of them are the MC.
Or a question about nice areas to visit. Should I be answering that question for the paleolithic Fertile Crescent or the colony ship to Alpha Centauri?
So, I decided I'm going to start taking part next month again (or, maybe I'll just jump in in the middle), and just pick a character and setting for each question. It might even give me some ideas for additional settings and incarnations.
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
Here's what I've seen since joining the #Fediverse.
Jewelry makers trying to earn a living. Writers who need others to know their tales are ready to be consumed. Trans people who need to be heard. Citizens who fear what their country has become, and absurdists who want to make me laugh.
This place holds the promise we hoped Twitter and Facebook promised us.
Keep posting. Keep sharing. Keep considering.
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
Finally found some useful tool with AI that will probably help my #adhd - https://goblin.tools/
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
A little professional story:
Please be kind when "correcting" co-workers about something you feel they've misunderstood or are just wrong about.
One of the really weird things in my life is that I seem to encounter -or trigger- edge cases.
For non-technical folks: an "edge case" is a generally rare bug that only occurs under a very particular set of circumstances, usually quite obscure.
Someone might report a bug that no-one can reproduce, and it turns out that the bug only occurs on the last Friday of the month, if the device is used between 9pm and 10pm. We refer to something like that as an "edge case".
A few years ago I found a *really* weird bug in one of our products, and I mentioned it to one of our senior developers.
That person then proceeded to loudly, and in front of an entire group of co-workers, lambast me for something that was OBVIOUSLY end-user error, and was "fundamentally impossible" to be anything else.
It was one of the most humiliating professional experiences of my life.
It made me incredibly wary of raising Jira tickets, unless I could fully reproduce and document a bug.
A couple of years after this incident, I was chatting with another dev who'd started working with our company, and was in QA, and he mentioned this edge case he'd recently encountered.
If condition A, and condition B, and condition C, AND condition D were all met, it would trigger this really weird bug.
...the same one I'd mentioned to one of our senior devs a couple of years earlier. It wasn't end-user error. It was an edge case.
[sigh]
Yesterday during our weekly technical meeting, I asked a question as to whether an underlying software process had been significantly & quietly changed recently.
I explained that I'd encountered a number of weird incidents over the past couple of months, but nothing I could log or document, just that I had a gut feel that there's a intermittent bug in play, and that after my 15-hour day on Wednesday, I was now almost certain that changes might have occurred in that particular process.
Turns out that entire process had been rewritten.
I was asked why I hadn't raised any Jira tickets for it.
Our dev team could have had a couple of months headstart on this issue, and documented occurrences of it, if a deeply frustrated and under-pressure dev hadn't publicly ripped me a new arsehole five years ago.
Everything is copacetic. No-one is upset with me, the dev who asked me why I hadn't raised the ticket was the QA dev, and all I had to say was "Bug X", and we both laughed, and the dev team gets more of my "gut feel" bug reports moving forward.
The other dev and I are on excellent terms these days as well. I went to the mat with them three years ago, and they apologised, and we talked out our differences, and we have a great working relationship now.
How you treat people matters, even in a moment of deep frustration, and can have long-term consequences in ways that you may not expect.
Be kind. Always.
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
a fair question
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A book cover for a teen devotional entitled "If God Loves me, Why Can't I Get My Locker Open?" by Lorraine Peterson Cover depicts the silhouette of a perhaps thoughtful, perhaps dejected teen sitting with their elbows propped on their knees with a faded picture of a child reading the bible as an underlay
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
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Data is sitting at a table in a high back conference type chair. Some model starships are decorating the wall behind him. He is looking down with a dumb half smile and has one finger each in a finger trap toy that is colored pink and green.
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
It's #HootinTootinTuesday again! Post some jokes or funny memes under this hashtag today, and bring lots of smiles to #Mastodon.
#Humor #Humour #FunnyMeme #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekSNW #TNG #SNW #Voyager #Picard #Janeway #CaptainJaneway #ChristopherPike #CaptainPike #EarlGrey #CoffeeMemes
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Three images from Star Trek. 1) Picard holding a cup of tea, saying "Coffee is disgusting! I drink only the finest leaves." 2) Captain Janeway saying, "Tea is just pompous water. Real adults drink coffee!" 3) Capt Christopher Pike (Strange New Worlds version) smiling and saying, "Sometimes I add rainbow sprinkles to my hot cocoa."
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
An amazing demo of polyphonic overtone singing, where one person sings two notes simultaneously. https://kottke.org/14/10/self-harmony
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
NOT MINE BUT I LOVE IT:
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Prometheus tethered to a rock while a bird alights to eat his liver, captioned "Every day is a fresh start."
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months agoWow, the top 25 finalists in the kids category of the USA Mullet Championship. Glorious. https://www.mulletchamp.com/all-digital-contests/2023-kids-digital-contest/kids-top-25/
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months agoTwitter's t[dot]co link wrapping domain is delaying forwarding to certain domains (NY Times, Threads) by 5 seconds. I still use Twitter for exactly one thing (finding gift links for paywalled articles) and can confirm this is a thing. So petty. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130060
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months agoFormer NFL player Michael Oher is suing Sean & Leigh Anne Tuohy, who Oher says never adopted him and instead tricked him into making them his conservators, thus pocketing millions from The Blind Side movie. https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38190720/blind-side-subject-michael-oher-alleges-adoption-was-lie-family-took-all-film-proceeds
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
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Person 1: I bought a cake! Person 2: Oh wow! What's the occasion? Person 1: I made progress in my to-do list and felt like celebrating. Person 2: Oh that's great! A closeup of the list shows that the first item “buy a cake” is crossed out followed by: •organize desk •clean out garage •fix broken shelf •re-stain deck •trim tree branches •consolidate credit cards •replace missing tile in bathroom •take dead batteries to recycling center •replace burned out bulbs on porch •talk to boss about vacation time off
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
Apparently we have outsourced protection of the American president to Canadians.
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Canadian geese in the ellipsis in front of the White House.
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
stop making the conversation about work-at-home about productivity
eliminating non-essential worker commutes means less fossil fuels wasted
remote policies increase access for disabled people, especially with chronic illness that flares
LGBT folks and PoC experience less bigotry and it's easier to report bigotry when they do
do some people want hybrid? do some people want on-site? sure
but stop pretending the discussion was about productivity or what employees want
it's about real estate portfolios
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
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The classic "Kilroy Was Here" meme, featuring a cartoon man with a large nose peering over a wall, and the text "Kilroy was here".
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Two crudely drawn Among Us characters
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Text of the LDS scripture, D&C 88:119: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/88?lang=eng#p119
Dan Jones shared 1 year, 10 months ago
Sit down, won't you?